Sign Up for Our Heart Health Newsletter

Thanks for signing up!

MONDAY, May 21, 2012 (MedPage Today) — Populations that gather or grow what they need to survive from nature and have little contact with the outside world appear to have lower cardiovascular risk than more modern societies, two studies showed.

The first, reported by Michael Gurven, PhD, an anthropologist at the University of California Santa Barbara, and colleagues showed that forager-farmers living in the Bolivian Amazon had a low prevalence of hypertension (about 4 percent to 5 percent) and smaller increases in blood pressure with age compared with the U.S. population.

The second study, reported by Daniel Lemogoum, MD, MPH, of the Université Libre de Bruxelles-Erasme Hospital in Brussels, and colleagues showed that African hunter-gatherers who remained isolated from civilization had less aortic stiffness than more modernized groups.

Both studies, which were published online in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association, suggest that lifestyle factors present in these traditional populations — high levels of physical activity, low stress levels, and diets rich in fruits and vegetables — may protect against the effects of aging.

Gurven and colleagues took repeated measures of blood pressure in 2,248 men (average age 39.3) and women (average age 38) living in 82 Tsimane villages from July 2002 through December 2010. The Tsimane people gather and grow their own food, surviving mostly on plantains, rice, corn, manioc, fish, and hunted game.

The prevalence of hypertension was low, occurring in 3.9 percent of women and 5.2 percent of men. Persistent hypertension was present in 2.9 percent of both men and women. In contrast, recent data showed that 33 percent of U.S. adults have hypertension.

For each decade of life, average increases in systolic, diastolic, and pulse pressure among the women were 2.86, 0.95, and 1.95 mm Hg.

The figures for men were 0.91 and 0.93 mm Hg for systolic and diastolic and -0.02 mm Hg for pulse pressure.

For comparison, among U.S. adults older than 40, systolic blood pressure increases by about 7 mm Hg per decade of life.

In general, greater exposure to modernization — defined according to smoking experience, schooling, Spanish fluency, and distance to the nearest town — had little effect on blood pressure.

In an accompanying editorial, Fabio Angeli, MD, of the Hospital Media Valle del Tevere in Perugia, Italy, and colleagues pointed out that a previous analysis by Gurven's team showed that body mass index had a significant effect on blood pressure in the Tsimane people.

That suggests "that weight control throughout the entire life may play an important role to prevent the rise in blood pressure with age," they wrote.

Lemogoum and colleagues looked into whether the degree of arterial stiffness — which is associated with atherosclerosis — differed among three groups of people living in Cameroon — traditional Pygmies living in the forest in hunter-gatherer subsistence mode, contemporary Pygmies who had migrated to a semi-urban area, and Bantou farmers living in the same environment.

Traditional Pygmies were shorter and had lower body weight than the other two groups. They also had lower LDL cholesterol and higher HDL cholesterol compared with the Bantou farmers. Blood pressure and heart rate were similar in all three groups.

In all three groups combined, mean arterial pressure and age were associated with a worsening of PWV, and traditional Pygmy status was associated with improving PWV.

Aging was accompanied by increases in blood pressure, aortic augmentation index, and PWV in the Bantou farmers and contemporary Pygmies, although none of those factors changed with age in the traditional Pygmy group, probably because of their low body weight, according to the researchers.

Limitations of this second study were the small number of patients evaluated and lack of information on serum DNA telomerase length and activities to assess a potential genetic versus environmental role.

This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here.

Advertising Notice

This Site and third parties who place advertisements on this Site may collect and use information about
your visits to this Site and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of
interest to you. If you would like to obtain more information about these advertising practices and to make
choices about online behavioral advertising, please click here.